Fedora Remix for Raspberry Pi makes the $35 PC useful (video)

The Raspberry Pi is a $25 to $35 computer that’s about the size of a deck of cards. But the little PC isn’t really much use without software to run on it — and that’s where Seneca College’s new Fedora Remix for the Raspberry Pi comes in.

A group of developers has optimized a version of Fedora Linux to run on the $35 computer and play well with its ARM-based processor. The complete operating system can be loaded onto a 2GB SD card, which would probably add just a few bucks to the cost of the computer.

The operating system comes preloaded with a web browser, word processor, and other applications, and users should be able to install third party apps.

Seneca’s demo video doesn’t just provide a look at the Raspberry Pi remix, but also Seneca’s build farm with a number of other devices with ARM-based processors.

Long story short, Fedora Remix will make the tiny computer useful for those looking for a low cost computing solution. Once you have the operating system on an SD card, all you need to do is plug in a keyboard and display to start using the computer.

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They got FireFox to run, only problem is it consumers too much energy and they’re looking into ways to optimize it or find a better alternative.

So, presumably, it should be able to run Flash once they get everything working but it remains to be seen if they can get it working well enough.

Anonymous

Put a dozen of these (256 megs, ethernet port, 8gb or 16gb SD card) in a rack, along with an ethernet hub, and each one could be its own micro-server; no worrying about someone sharing the computer with you hogging the CPU or hard disk the way you have to with virtual servers.

Anonymous

I’d use an ARM device as a server if there was any software for it. Just because the OS will run on ARM, doesn’t mean X86 Linux apps will run on it. In the video he mentioned Apache. So apparently they are working on an ARM version.